Virtual Crowdsourcing Communities

Description

Virtual Crowdsourcing Communities (VCC) have emerged as high activity domains on the Internet. VCC are designed for a variety of purposes, ranging from VCC for Creation (Wikipedia), for Work (TopCoder, odesk), or for Funding (Sell-a-Band, Kickstarter, etc.). The significance of these communities is evident by the impact they have on information and content generation as well as transmission, and socialization. For example, today, Wikipedia is quickly becoming a primary source of information in a variety of domains.
Crowdsourcing is also becoming more and more attractive for firms. By practicing Crowdsourcing firms tend to get access to services, ideas, or content from a large group of people via VCC. In this vein, firms’ traditional Make-Or-Buy decisions turn to the management and integration of globally distributed resources. For example, firms source the generation of innovations or the work on tasks through VCC as the examples of Dell’s Ideastorm or Amazon’s Mechanical Turk illustrate.
Within the field of IS researchers are interested in studying interaction patterns, social structures, transaction processes, management aspects, business models, and design aspects of information systems and services for VCC. Other related issues are trust, network effects as well as transaction costs. Also, the operational mechanisms of VCC are of interest to practice. In this vein, research that unlocks the value of "Wisdom of Crowds" or "Collective Intelligence" can be very insightful.

Suggested Topics

Despite the increasing popularity of VCC, several questions relating to VCC remain largely unexplored. We call for papers on all aspects of VCC. We welcome empirical, conceptual and theoretical work. Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

Social, political and economic impact of VCC

Community models, platforms, services, and interactions in VCC

Management of VCC

VCC-related business models

Innovation and content generation in VCC

Collaboration among and between VCC members

Case studies and empirical studies, best practices and lessons learned